Feeling at Peace

                                     




We traveled to the Bunabukoya Village to continue to help build the health clinic, they had already dug the outline for the foundation (pictured above) When we got there we helping in getting the mixtures of the foundation together. This consisted of mixing small rocks with some cement and putting it along the outline of the clinic and then also bringing the bricks that were made previous to the site to set it. We were the manual labor that brought the rocks, cement, and sand to the building sight. Which we were able to do pretty successfully thanks to the help of a man named Henry Ford who invented the assembly line.

We put that assembly line to very good use. Throughout the days when we were doing this we would get a little grumpy because we were tired and it was really hot outside and usually just when you thought you couldn't handle it anymore…. the kids would have recess time and come and join us in the assembly line with all of their little sacks and lighten all of our spirits. i don't know what it is but when you see those kids hauling cement, bricks, sand, rocks, whatever it is i would get the strength to keep going. They were so eager to help! i don't know if it was because they wanted the clinic or if they just liked being around the Muzungu's but ill take either one because i know i wouldn't have been able to do half of the labor without their smiling faces. And if the work was too hard for them, meaning their parents told them they couldn't help they would just sit on the side and watch us, which was pretty encouraging too!!!!! AHH I love these kids!!!

        

Sarah the incredible host!

Also, Sarah taught us how to cook, i learned how to mingle posho.

She is the most excited and happy woman i have ever met! she always greets us with the biggest smiles and warmest hugs! i love it! she probably only understand 10 percent of the conversations that i have with her but her bubbly personality makes me feel like i could sit and talk with her all day! She was telling us about her life and how she and her husband Timothy, (a man that African men should follow example from because he treats his wife how she deserves to be treated) are able to provide a living. We asked her how she is able to get money to buy food and she just looked at us and was like… if we need food and i cannot grow it i sell a chicken and then go and buy it. mind you this woman is the one that we live with 3 days of the week and she has 10 -12 "guests" staying at her house sleeping in her living room and she goes out and sells a chicken so that she can make us posho and scuma (which is like spinach) and then kills another chicken so that we can have a protein to eat with our meal. And asks for NOTHING in return. We always give her money as a contribution but she never asks and i know she doesn't expect it. 

Timothy, Sarah's husband

When her husband timothy found out that i was thinking about staying in uganda longer than august (yeah that may be a spoiler for some of you its just a thought and who know if i can actually afford to stay here longer anyways)  he got so excited that he had the translator tell me that if i stay and were to come to the village i will always have a place at their home and that he would accept me like a daughter. He doesn't have any men to marry me off to so i'm pretty sure that he has no ulterior motives in offering his home to me. They this family is so incredible. i think one of the reasons why i love sarah so much is because she is a woman after my own heart. Her home is place where you can feel instantly welcomed and she takes in "stray" people every day. in Sarah's blood family there is only her, her husband, and her daughter vikki. But her home is always filled with people. there is always laughter, happiness and bodies of people strewn about the floors finding a place to sleep. She cooks to feed the masses and it is always eaten up. 

Me attempting to mingle posho

One of the many people that stay at Sarah's often

Each of these people are not immediate family to Sarah but they come and go  as if they are!! I love it!

Vikki and Sarah, can't you just feel the happiness coming from them!!!

i want a home like hers where people feel welcome to drop in to say hi. or if they are in need of a place to rest their head they know that there is always a spot at cami's house where you will be welcomed with a warm smile and a BIG hug :) 

We gooo we go uganda cranes we go!

This was a really bad snap shot of just how crowded it was

We goo we go uganda cranes we go! that is the phrase you need to learn if you are going to go to a Ugandan Football game you must know this phrase. I was really excited to go to a football game here in uganda. We bought uganda crane jerseys so that we wouldn't stick out, which isn't actually possible considering there was our group of muzungu's and a couple that were not african in the entire stadium.

Im so excited! and for some reason my eyes look really really blue

It was a world cup qualifier agains Senegal and so i was really excited to be in a stadium in Africa for a world cup qualifier game! The quality of the game was actually a little disappointing. i felt like we were watching a high school game in relation to the quality… BUT….. it truly was a great experience. 

Uganda Cranes warming up!!

I got really into the game because i was so frustrated with how they were playing, both teams had HORRIBLE first touches, and they were lazy and didn't make runs off the ball, and they fouled like it was the goal of the game to see who could take out the most players. which don't get me wrong i like a good shove now and then but when you have people flopping all over the place and it messes with the flow of the game i get a little upset. 

but it was so much fun! we actually landed in the front of the sports section of the newspaper. Pretty cool huh!?! 

It was my first time in Kampala which the biggest city in uganda so it was weird to be where there were so many people and to be honest i don't think i liked it very much, there were so many armored guards and people were getting things stolen right out of their hands, but we were with very trust ugandans who actually saw that someone was trying to steal a phone and began hitting the guy with his plastic horn. the guy didn't get away and the phone was returned safely. 

We are in the Newspaper!!!!

Me and Lex were both wanting to play soccer SO bad!!

There is another game this weekend that i may or may not go to, i haven't decided yet.  i liked being there but i don't know if its worth the 5 hour bus ride… i guess we will have to wait and see. 

This is why our team is so awesome, because we have rebecca and holly as our country directors.

disclaimer:   AND I CANNOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE THIS LOOK DECENT! THE PICTURES DO NOT STAY WHERE THEY ARE SUPPOSE TO, SORRY

Truly Heart Breaking

So, I have been working with the people in the namatala slums and each time that we go out into the community there is a girl that follows us. At first I didn't realize that she would follow us, but when we were finished doing what we needed to in the community, without a fail she would come up to me and in the sweetest, most timid voice, averting her eyes to make sure she doesn't make contact would say " I want to go to school" my heart broke the first time she said it and i was a little overwhelmed with the other things that had happened that day and so i said, " you see that man i am with, he is a teacher you should go and talk to him" and left it at that. i am a little ashamed that i didn't stop to get the whole story, but i didn't. about 3 days later we were back in the community and were doing some water filtering surveys and i was all wrapped up in getting the information that we needed and then this same girl comes up to me and in the same timid voice says " i want to go to school" this time thankfully i was more receptive to stopping for a moment and i asked her how old she was and what her names was. She kind of  got really shy and just wouldn't respond. So i walked up to the man we were with. His name is Pastor Philip and I told him that this girl just told me she wanted to go to school and she has come up to me each time that i was here and said the same thing. He got a quizzical look in his eye and decided to investigate. So he walked over to the girl and greeted her in her local language and was able to get her name, which is deborah, and he asked about her parents and she said that they had died. as soon as she began speaking to him she started to cry. They were shy, scared, sad, tears and that is really and truly where my heart BROKE.
There have been so many sad stories of peoples lives and my heart hurts for all of the people that i meet but for whatever reason this girls demeanor struck a chord with me and i started to cry. After Pastor Philip spoke with her i asked him about it and he said he couldn't enroll her in school because they only have P1-3 and she has completed up to P4. But i could tell he wasn't done working with her and that helped my heart a little bit.
One of the team members that was with us has continued to follow up with Philip in figuring out what to do to help her and she blogged about it today. so i am going to include the link here because her description is better than i can tell it. http://colorlessclassblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/deborah/

I don't yet have a picture of Deborah, but i will post it when i get one. but there are kids from Namatala 

Raftin the Nile!

SO.. this weekend we also decided to travel down to jinja to do white water rafting down the nile! yeah, i have swam in the NILE!!!!  it was so much fun! our guide's name was Duncan. He was originally from england but had lived in New Zealand for the last 5 years and he does rafting as a job just because he thinks its fun!! after rafting and experiencing the excitement myself i think i could take that life on.  except it only pays 60 dollars a trip... which is livable here in uganda so that works...

i think me and kelsey (the girl to the right of me) have the best faces on!!!

when we hit this i was in the very back left and eventually every fell on top of me... IT WAS AWESOME!!!!

This was the the funnest rafting trip, it will always be remembered.

Also, sadly i dont' have a picture of this but when we got back to our hostel there was a kayak that was tipped upsidedown on the roof of the restaurant and there is a rope tied around it and i grabbed the rope and lifted myeslf into the kayak and hung upside down for a bit. it was so much fun! and i did it all by myself... yeah i felt pretty strong, but it was late at night and no one had their camera so we weren't able to take a pic of it. sad day, cause it was really fun!!!

True African life

So there is so much to blog about and so I will attempt to explain in as much detail as possible why my heart has been sold to Mbale Uganda.

On Monday of last week we prepared early in the morning to go to the Bunabuyoka Village. I’m pretty sure I have mentioned this place. It is where we are going to be building a health clinic and finishing a school and doing some Entrepreneurship classes. So we are preparing to take all of the gear that we will need to survive 3 days living in an African village. We talked about how we were going to be True Africans by the time of this trip. So we decided to test out how we were going to take our mattresses on our Boda Boda... This is our practice round....

And then we decided we would let the locals figure it out!! our ideas weren't the best...

When we got to the village i loved every minute of it!!!  When we got there we had so much fun. We hauled rocks down from this hill so that they could make the foundation for the health clinic and the floor of the school. We were so tired and the kids during recess wanted to help us so they picked up rocks that were often times bigger than themselves... But they were so excited to help!!!!

Also I am loving the local food here... we get to eat with our hands and i am really liking the posho( which is the white stuff) and matoke (which is smushed bananas).... can you tell?











Then there is a boy named joseph, at first we thought his name was yusef... but upon further investigation im pretty sure it is joseph.

He was the most excited and happy boy! I would squeeze him till his eye pop out. He became my best buddy. My favorite thing was when we would be walking up the hill to go and get more rocks i would feel this hand slip into mine and i would look down and see him staring back at me with his inquisitive eyes. my heart melts every time!
He is also a huge dancer! Every time music is on he cant stop moving his body and he doesn't move the way an african usually does. He goes crazy and moves all of his body parts. i love it! we had so much fun together. It got to the point that i would wait to feel that sweet little hand to reach for mine and then i knew i could climb that treacherous mountain again to bring more rocks down ( i realized at that point that i was getting a glimpse of what it was like to build the Salt Lake Temple)
He started to be my guide and out walk in front of me and hold my hand so that i wouldn't fall... He is only 4 years old! how do these kids get to be so old at such a young age. they are so incredible and sweet i don't think i will ever find kids like this anywhere else! I love them!!!!

This is vikki and Brenda, their english is great and they loved to teach us all of their games.. one was like tug-o-war and i couldn't stop laughing. i

The pile of rocks that we carried down from the mountain

i think they were trying to do the Shaka but couldn't quite get their fingers to cooperate  :) 

My man Jospeh! i love him!!!!

Bunabuyoka... THE pearl of Africa

So... i finally got to skype my mom today and one of the first things she informed me of is how bad i am at updating my blog. So i am going to try and recap all of the incredible things that have happened to me in the last few days. so... here it goes.

last week we met with an organization called Christian Faith in Action. They are a non profit organization that works with people in really small villages. Help worked with them last year in a village called Bunabuyoka. We had decided to work with them again. They are in need of a Health Clinic and a roof on the school that they built. The village sounded so great and the people sounded incredible. but i don't think i was prepared for just how amazing they are!

We had met with CFA and decided to go to the village on monday to talk with the village leaders so that we were all on the same page about what we can do and what we expect the village to do. 

So on monday we woke up at 6:30 AM and got in taxi that would take us an hour out of Mbale to another district ( county) called Manafa. In the taxi which could be renamed a Volkswagen bus with 22 people all scrammed inside. 

Then there was a hike that was suppose to last 30 minutes, but that was only the case if you grew up in the jungles of Africa and were use to running in the hills every day! so it took us an hour and a half. It was very treacherous, it was almost straight up hill the whole time. so by the time we got the top i was EXHAUSTED!!!!! and we still had another 20 minutes hike, which thankfully was a stroll to the place where the school was and where our meeting was set to happen. 

When we first got to the top of the hill there was a group of men that had drums and they were going to accompany us to the part of the village we needed to go to. Which was fun. it was like a welcoming committee. Children from all over the place came running to the path to see what all the commotion was about and i think they were even more astonished to find a huge group of Muzungu's walking in their village. They were so cute. A lot of the village had never seen a white person before and if they had it was from last years Help team so it was still very new to them. They were either excited and wanted to come hold our hands. Or they were curiously terrified. 

As we got closer to the school we started to hear children's voices singing. It was the cutest, most sweet voices i had ever heard. They were welcoming us to their village. It was a very special experience. They sang for about 15 minutes and i honestly don't think i could describe to you the happiness and light that i felt at that moment. The spirit was so strong! just listen to their voices! 

My heart melted at this point and I felt like  I had come home. It was interesting. Everyone in the village kept saying that they wanted us to feel at home and I already did! Once we got into the building the kids put on a little more of a performance for us...

Then the meeting began and we talked about all of the different things that we wanted to do, and every time we said something everyone would clap. Didn't really know how to respond to that. So we negotiated for about 2 hours to figure out the logistics of getting the school finished, which needed a roof and floor. Also how to construct the Health clinic. We concluded that they would build the walls and then we would provide the roof and the floor for the clinic as well.... we are also going to be helping them to build the health clinic so i will be knowing how to brick lay. Im excited about that. we spent the entire day there and i loved every minute of it! i cant wait to go back, we will be going there on sunday night and staying there until tuesday!!!

This is a picture of a sweet girl that couldn't stop dancing even when she was sitting on the bench. SO CUTE!

Another project that we are doing, which i am actually a team lead for is putting in place and training the Namatala community Water filters. I am really excited about this project! They actually had a blog post from the Organization that donated the filters for us last year and what they actually did was copy and paste the email that i sent them asking for more filters and put a few of the pictures that i sent them with it. Its a great cause. Im really excited about it! The village is also great in maintaining it and managing the water filters which i think is the best part of it! i was so terrified that i was going to come to Africa and do one of those feel good projects that when i leave have no impact on the village or leave the people worse than they were before, but the projects that we are working with is working with the communities in making sure that they are sustained and continue to be effective when we leave ( which at this point i don't want to ever leave....) 

 This is the link to the blog.... RainCathcer provides clean water filters to Namatala slums in Uganda | RainCatcher
www.raincatcher.org

So that is a brief snap shot of what i will be working on this summer, i promise to be better at posting and being more detailed. I love every minute of what i am doing and have really started to feel like i have found where i belong!!!!! 

Boda Boda

There are only a few ways of getting around in Mbale. One is walking, which is nice when it is not blisteringly hot... the other is a taxi which  an often used mode of transportation but it is a little more expensive. So the most common form of transportation is a Boda Boda. I would say a boda boda is a mix between a scooter and a motorcycle. It has one guy that is the driver and you can fit a good amount of people. I have seen two grown woman with a baby on the back, and the woman sit side saddle. which makes sense because you are in a skirt. but i haven't ventured to try the boda boda side saddle. But i did document one of our boda adventures and let me tell you, it was fun. 

We were going to the Namatala village but we didn't know exactly where we were going go we were going to meet with a man named Moses that was going to meet us at the shell gas station and then we were going to go from there. 

We flagged down a Boda driver whose name is John and we told him we needed him to take us to the Shell station near the Namatala Slum. He had a little bit of a glazed over eye look and then said, ok 2,000 schillings for both. this was pretty reasonable because we were going outside of town. So we jumped on, fulling trusting that they knew where we were going. Once we got to the first shell station it didn't look like it was where we were suppose to be so we told them the next Shell station. When we got there we couldn't find Moses. We couldn't find him, and had to wait for 20 minutes while our country director Rebecca tried to phone him and let him know where we were. 

While waiting, all of these children started coming out of their homes to see the muzungu's and we took tons of pictures with the children, then we were on our way again to find the Namatala slum. We had to make one more pit stop and then we finally arrived. it was a great adventure and i have decided that i love travel by Boda and it will be my preferred mode of transportation this summer.

We are so excited to Boda!!!

When we stopped at the first Shell gas station and were a bit confused...

I tried to learn their names so from the left to the right is boyee,( boy' e), Sophie, naumateria (Her name was the hardest to pronounce, but it sounded beautiful, she would smile every time i attempted to say her name), and Dauphine she was very sharp and had a great memory.

Video of one of the rides. 

Successful Boda ride!